Tribe working to save Lakota language

PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION — Skin has gathered at the corners of her eyes into soft brown wrinkles, and the tattoos on her forearms have faded into an inky blue. Bernice Spotted Eagle rests on a couch in her three-bedroom house, her feet protected from cold linoleum floors by red slippers. The house is warmed by space heaters, one of which almost burned the house down. But it is this house, she says as she gestures with small hands, that used to be so packed with relatives and friends, sleeping bags littering the floor every night.

Her house, a safe haven she fervently defends as alcohol- and drug-free, is in the middle of a culde-sac of tribal housing. It is with this view that Spotted Eagle says she can most clearly see the roadblocks that stand in the way of breathing life back into her native Lakota language.

Graffiti sprayed on a nearby house leaves a chilling reminder that the Crips and the Bloods frequent the area. A neighbor was stabbed to death in an argument recently

People often stop by to ask for money or food.

She keeps the front door locked.

The Pine Ridge Indian reservation, a 3,500-square-mile plot of land home to the largest concentration of Lakota people, is also home to the effort to save the indigenous Lakota language from extinction.

The odds are stacked against them.

A 2005 study done by Colorado State University, and accepted by the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, estimates the population at about 29,000. But Pine Ridge Tribal Enrollments puts that number closer to 20,000.

Experts estimate that between 5 percent and 15 percent of enrolled tribal members are fluent speakers, and almost 60 percent of those speakers are 50 and older, according to the Oceti Wakan, a local non- profit group dedicated to preserving the Lakota language and culture.

The first documented reservation effort to revitalize the language began in 1969. Since then, schools and organizations throughout the reservation have implemented a language curriculum, hired parttime teachers and called on elders to share what they know. But not a single fluent speaker has emerged in half a century.

Many elders here blame the language’s downfall on Catholic boarding schools, where they were sent as children. Lakota culture and language were forbidden.

Philomine Lakota, now a Red Cloud Indian School language teacher with wide-set shoulders and a commanding presence in the classroom, attended a boarding school, where speaking the language was akin to rebellion and was promptly followed with punishment.

The burden to carry on the language shouldn’t fall to the elders, she says. She tries to teach her grandson, and that’s it.

But Spotted Eagle, 63, warns of bigger problems than haunting memories. For her, the Lakota people must first try to overcome many things before they can reclaim the language — poverty and drugs, alcohol, violence, suicide and a loss of identity for a younger generation caught between two worlds.

The elders are right, experts say. But whether it’s the victim of past oppression or a widening gap among generations doesn’t matter. It’s disappearing all the same.

Word by word. Fluent speaker by fluent speaker.

Darrell Kipp, founder of the Piegan Institute on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana, agreed with Harvey.

Every language is a library because the people have developed it through their relationship with the land, time and ecology. The Lakota language especially, he said, “is directly reflective of a longterm residency” on the land.

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